A class of well structured petri nets for flexible manufacturing systems

Abstract

This paper is devoted to the synthesis of "well behaved" (live) nets. The work focuses on the synthesis of a subclass of nets that appear in the modeling of a wide set of flexible manufacturing systems (FMS). Basically, these nets are composed of a set of sequential processes that share a set of common resources (with some constraints in their use). Among the set of problems related to FMS, we are going to concentrate on deadlocks. In this paper, we show that for the systems under consideration it is possible to know, from a structural point of view, if a deadlock is reachable. We also show that this knowledge can be obtained in linear time (with respect to the size of the PN model). The result can be used in order to have a quick answer to whether a given configuration is correct or not, to study if such a configuration exists or not and to conclude if some deadlock control policy is needed. Topics: System design and verification using nets, Analysis and synthesis, Structure and behaviour of nets, Application to flexible manufacturing.